For his opponents, the lies were intended to be profoundly demoralizing. Neither counting them nor checking facts nor debunking conspiracies made any difference. Trump demonstrated again and again that the truth doesn’t matter. In rational people this provoked incredulity, outrage, exhaustion, and finally an impulse to crawl away and abandon the field of politics to the fantasists.
For believers, the consequences were worse. They surrendered the ability to make basic judgments about facts, exiling themselves from the common framework of self-government. They became litter swirling in the wind of any preposterous claim that blew from @realDonaldTrump. Truth was whatever made the world whole again by hurting their enemies—the more far-fetched, the more potent and thrilling. After the election, as charges of voter fraud began to pile up, Matthew Sheffield, a reformed right-wing media activist, tweeted: “Truth for conservative journalists is anything that harms ‘the left.’ It doesn’t even have to be a fact. Trump’s numerous lies about any subject under the sun are thus justified because his deceptions point to a larger truth: that liberals are evil.” –George Packer
Many voted for Trump in the hopes of destroying the Liberal administrative state. Bannonism is its contemporary form and Donald Trump was his hoped-for blunt instrument to accomplish it. Mission largely accomplished. It's a darker but inevitable development of the longer-term project announced by Grover Norquist to shrink government to a size where it can be drowned in a bathtub. This has always been a naive fantasy. As I said in a recent re-post, big government goes hand in hand with big capitalism. Capitalism is the sun; government the moon.
The only real question is to whom most of the benefits of capitalism accrue. Whatever Radical Libertarians like Norquist think are the consequences of their ideology, the only important one is that the rich get richer while the poor get poorer because Libertarian societies become Social Darwinian theaters in which the already powerful are free to exploit the weak without legal constraint. All other justifications for destroying the 'administrative state' are putting lipstick on the proverbial pig.
So in the 80s and 90s the Libertarians with NeoLiberal Democrat acquiescence dismantled American social democracy founded and developed during and after the New Deal. This allowed capitalism to do its creative/destructive thing, which most negatively impacted, among others, the kind of people who show up at Trump rallies. So it's a perfect situation for the donor class Mitch McConnell carries water for. And the greatest thing of all is that the woes of the Trump base are blamed on the evil Libs. How sweet it must be to be Mitch McConnell and the super-wealthy he works for.
These GOP elites who were initially horrified by Trump have come to see that allying themselves with him gives them cover with the pitchfork crowd, who they fear would otherwise be coming after them. They have learned an important lesson from Trump, which is that the best way to stay in power is to tell big lies, to create a theater of the absurd that plays to the base's worst instincts and delusional fantasies—"the more far-fetched, the more potent and thrilling".
And Trump did it in a way they would not have believed possible to get away with before they saw him do it. So that's how you explain why Republican leadership supports all these insane lawsuits to get the election overturned. It's all theater of the absurd, but it's theater that they believe is necessary for them to retain power. That it's destroying our democracy is an idea that's too abstract for them to factor in. It would requires a level of thoughtfulness that is beyond their scope.
And so while the folks in the Trump base don't trust establishment elites like McConnell, they do, perversely, trust Trump, and that's why establishment elites have pivoted to go along with his corruption, his destruction of traditional democratic norms, and his astonishing incompetence–and now his truly astonishing theater of the absurd with all the lawsuits. That they would go along with all this so easily has surprised me a bit. I hadn't thought the Republicans had become so nihilistic. I knew that there was always in the GOP a strong current of cynical expediency in the name of retaining power: the line from Nixon through Gingrich to Cheney is pretty dark and cynical. But I would never have thought that they would have capitulated so cravenly and completely to a corrupt demagogue like Trump.
And so now here we are, and I have no idea how we recover from this. I knew Trump was going to be bad, but I had no idea that he would be this bad. He exceeded my worst expectations, and his impact has been far more destructive than I thought it could be in four years. I thought there would be more institutional constraints. I learned, for instance, that the Deep State isn't as powerful as I thought it might be. It's really astonishing to me that there was so little push back from people who saw through the lies but went along with them anyway. I was surprised how ineffective were the efforts of those who did see through the lies and who did did push back. It was truly astonishing how much Trump got away with, and I guess he will continue to get away with because the folks with the pitchforks have got his back.
And this points to the real tragedy–the way that people who don't know better have been manipulated. I understand the criticism of the What's the Matter with Kansas argument, that some values are more important than economic interests in motivating political choices. And I agree with that critique. But when those values are shaped by resentment-fueled delusional thinking promoted by a demagogic crackpot, we're no longer debating the legitimate values of one party competing with the values of the other. We're talking about something on a whole different level. We're talking about how the Big Lie is destroying the world's oldest current democracy. Like a lot of things, it won't be missed by most until it's gone.
Update: Just saw this by Michelle Goldberg this morning "Just How Dangerous Was Donald Trump:
Trump’s ability to envelop his followers in a cocoon of lies is unparalleled. The Bush administration deceived the country to go to war in Iraq. It did not insist, after the invasion, that weapons of mass destruction had been found when they obviously were not. That’s why the country was able to reach a consensus that the war was a disaster.
No such consensus will be possible about Trump — not about his abuses of power, his calamitous response to the coronavirus, or his electoral defeat. He leaves behind a nation deranged.
The postmodern blood libel of QAnon will have adherents in Congress. Kyle Rittenhouse, a young man charged with killing Black Lives Matter protesters, is a right-wing folk hero. The Republican Party has become more hostile to democracy than ever. Both the Trump and Bush presidencies concluded with America a smoking ruin. Only Trump has ensured that nearly half the country doesn’t see it.
His main achievement has been his destructiveness, the way he has cleared the field and created the conditions favorable for whatever more competent demagogue comes next.
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